As I anxiously await the start of the TV season (please don’t cancel my soon to be favorite shows, TV network that shall remain unnamed), I have been doing some reading to do more research on The Mind (just keep scrolling, it’s there). Me being on The Next MacGyver competition came about in the most unexpected way I had imagined. I heard about the competition through one of those email announcements from one of the professors at University of Washington, where I used to study Aerospace Engineering. I am one of those people who reads every random emails I get, so I read it, and it sounded cool.
The requirement for initial entry was to write a short synopsis for the TV show with female engineer as a protagonist. I have always been drawn to storytelling – I watch every behind the scene footage for movies I own, and love good stories. I knew I would write a story one day. What I didn’t expect was that it would come so soon in a form of a TV pilot competition.
As a female engineer myself, I have been frustrated with the portrayal of female scientists and engineers in TV shows and movies. Most are either fashion models in lab coats (dress code for women in STEM is a topic for another blog post), or beautiful but socially challenged. I get that the actresses who will be playing those characters are bound to be pretty – but why so much emphasis on the looks? and why do we have to be so weird? and why are ALL of them geniuses? There are really good, well-rounded characters out there – Kaylee Frye from Firefly and Special Agent Patterson from Blindspot come to mind. Others, like Dr. Temperance Brennan fron Bones and Dr. Maura Isles from Rizzoli & Isles, while both fantastic characters I absolutely love, are described as “weird” and “socially awkward.” All of them are unrealistically smart.
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to be pretty, genius, and adorably challenged in the social department to be an engineer or scientist.
I felt like it was time to bring life to some realistic characters. I wrote about the importance of being able to relate in my previous post. By making the engineers and scientists in the media eccentric, it is sending the message that you need to be like those characters to be an engineer or scientist, intentionally or not. After all, not everyone who goes on to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) grows up with a real life role model – I sure as hell didn’t have one. I only had books and TV shows to turn to, and the struggle (especially in the biography genre) to find a female kick ass engineer/scientist was real.
Well, one thing led to another, and I ended up as a top-12 finalist in The Next MacGyver competition. If any of you who saw me give a talk in the competition video thought the plot was a bit weak – you’re right, it was weak. I had less than a month between finding out that I was selected as a finalist, and a deadline to deliver a 10-page “show bible.” Oh, and I was also writing an academic paper for a conference in parallel.
“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”
“Because I got two huge papers due and I got about 2 weeks to spend on each of them.”
I didn’t win the competition, but it gave me enough positive feedback to turn the idea into a book. The one where I am actually doing research in the character and plot development. In doing so, I’m reading nonfiction to draw inspiration for my fictional universe.
After all, nonfiction tells better stories than fiction.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with an exerpt from the article called Road to Zootopia (coming to Netflix this month!). Good stories can inspire, and give people hope. And when you’re feeling all the feels, that’s when you know it’s a good story.
“There was a young African American man that was sharing these stories of just how difficult it was going through high school as one of two African American students in the school, and him sharing with us what that experience was like. His grandfather was always telling him you have to push through it. Then for him to say seeing Zootopia and feeling so much, feeling akin to Judy, to Nick, and how everything his grandfather had taught him, and he had kind of stride for, he was seeing our characters achieving those kinds of things and doing those things on screen, and he felt like, I feel like I’m not so alone in this world,” that, you’re speaking to me through this movie, and it’s making my struggles all for the better, and worth it.” – Road to Zootopia
I’m not some token bunny. 😎